Posts tagged: Walter Benjamin

In my research on the Monument to the Revolution, as one of the foremost commemorative spatial sites of state power in Mexico City, I have previously written on For the Desk Drawer how it is a significant architectural form and a profoundly ambiguous carrier of utopian promise. Completed on 20 November 1938 the monument has served, on one hand, as the stage for official ceremonies remembering and honouring the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and its heroes ever since. On the other hand it is also a space that invokes a redemptive dimension of collective resistance. Beyond the recognition of state and class power, the Monument to the Revolution is a meeting place for transformational politics, including social movements from students, workers, and campesinos in contesting the site as a social space. The Monument to the Revolution is therefore an ambiguous carrier of utopian promise because it is both the spatial base for honouring and remembering the “heroes” of the Mexican Revolution and for collective contemporary resistance against state and class power in Mexico. Most recently, I have come across the work of Thomas Kellner that captures the contradictory dynamics of the Monument to the Revolution in a new and original form. Why might this be interesting in thinking about monuments; the triumphal procession of the victors in history; and attempts to establish a tradition of the past?

News has broken this week in the Guardian that, rather incredulously, there is a proposal to name a luxury “4 star superior” hotel in Turin, with 155 rooms, a swimming pool, restaurant, gym and shops, as ‘Hotel Gramsci’. On Piazza Carlina in Turin, where the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci lived between 1919 and 1921 during the biennio rosso (Red Biennium) at the height of the revolutionary Factory Councils’ movement, the proposed Hotel Gramsci will stand attracting the custom of the bourgeoisie of the twenty-first century. Why is this development proposal so controversial?

What better way to become acquainted with my new position at the University of Sydney than to familiarise myself with some of the radical past of the city itself? With that aim in mind I recently picked up a copy, from the independent bookshop Gleebooks, of Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill’s excellent text Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes. The book is a fantastic read, jam-packed with details on the radical past of Sydney that digs behind the postcard social imagination of the present. In so doing it is an essential resource that helps to understand spaces of radical struggle from the founding of the city onwards and its peripheral places in the working-class suburbs, bohemian neighbourhoods, public spaces, and street protests that have challenged ruling power. Even more so, this book on the spatial struggles of radical Sydney is a fine localist counterpart to endeavours, such as David Harvey’s in Rebel Cities, that more broadly attempt to trace the spatial organisation and contestation of cityscapes. How does Radical Sydney address claims about the ‘right to the city’ in shaping power over the processes of urbanisation and how our cities are made and remade in a radical way?

In 2010, three cardboard boxes of Victor Serge’s papers were discovered in the archive of his late widow, Laurette Séjourné, in Amecameca, Mexico. They included letters, drafts, photographs, and a bundle of exercise books, covering the years 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1946. These have been published in French as Victor Serge, Carnets (1936-1947) and further reveal the confluence of concerns he had with both space and time. These are not yet available in English but New Left Review have produced a selection teasing out aspects of these concerns collected under the title ‘Mexican Notebooks’, covering his journey to, and time in, Mexico between 1941 and 1947. What might this snippet offer in understanding this forgotten Marxist and how might it be related to some of Victor Serge’s wider writings?

Drawing into double figures with my posts on Victor Serge, my aim here is to bring attention to a really useful new book entitled Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope by Paul Gordon. The book is published by Zer0 Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, which is doing great work in developing a series of new critical books on culture, society and politics. Gordon’s short book is a wonderful primer on Victor Serge that in just over 100 pages provides highly useful background on the novels, political writings, and memoirs all written by this participant-witness to revolutionary action. Indeed, one of the key themes to emerge from the book is the political act of witnessing: both in terms of Serge’s life of witnessing the experience of revolution and the repressive state in Russia and in witnessing along with other significant contemporaries wider conditions of revolution, repression, and the violence of state power.